Sunday, January 8, 2012

2011 - The Year in Review

NOTE:This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

After
a long year of blogging I find myself facing the “year in review” post. If you
don’t love the “year in review” format, you should: this is how, if you’ve been ignoring world
news for the last year, you can quickly come up to speed on the highlights.

You
might well ask, “Who is this random blogger to be deciding what news events
were most important?” Well, I did spend last year basing my blog posts
on the most important current events throughout the world. If this statement makes you chuckle, read on
because you may enjoy my rhetorical game of trying to make this outlandish
statement seem reasonable.

January

The
big news of January was of course the senseless shooting of nineteen people in Tucson. I’m not going to make light of this or try to
be funny because that would obviously be tasteless. (Don’t worry, the rest of this post won’t be
such a downer.)

During
this month I wrote about a very strange dream I had about being shot. Do you suppose guns show up in Americans’
dreams more than those of other cultures, where guns aren’t so readily
available? In other words, what is the impact on our collective
subconscious of knowing people around us could be armed? (I actually did have a gun pulled on me once,
by a complete stranger.)

We
Americans take the ubiquity of guns for granted, so it amazes me that other
developed countries are virtually gun-free.
In the “New Yorker” this week, America’s self-proclaimed “top cop” said,
“The firearm problem in England is almost laughable in the sense of how small
it is. The gangs [there], I would
describe as, basically, wannabes.” In
the same issue, a reporter interviews a Japanese policeman who deals with the
“yakuza,” the Japanese organized crime syndicate: “When I asked if he’d ever fired his gun, he
said that he hadn’t even used his nightstick.”

February

Needless
to say, the biggest news of February was the unveiling of “The Daily,” a
British newspaper from Rupert Murdoch that is only available in the US and only
for the iPad. It goes without saying that when historians
take the long view of 21st-century society, they will divide it into two
epochs: pre-Daily-for-iPad, and
post. About the only recent innovation
that comes close to ushering in such sweeping societal change is the Segway.

What
was Murdoch thinking? How many Americans
both a) want a British newspaper, and b) have an iPad? I’m not trying to say the iPad isn’t popular,
but compared to a regular computer?
(When I look at pageview stats for this blog, I see that less than 1%
were from iPads.) Perhaps Murdoch was
just distracted by all the illegal wiretapping he and his staff were embroiled
in.

Meanwhile,
traditional printed newspapers offer so much:
the ability to line a birdcage; the ability to wrap fish; the ability to
protect fragile plates and glasses when you’re packing up to move; even a way
to keep your head somewhat dry when it’s raining and you’ve forgotten your
umbrella. Murdoch’s overblown excitement
about electronic publishing ties in nicely with my February post “Death of a Bookstore” in which I describe
why I want to hate the Kindle and why I think bookstores won’t go extinct.

March

I
was really torn as to what was the biggest news for March: the tsunami in Japan, or the big iPhone
flap. So I decided to let Google
decide: I typed “tsunami” into the
search field and the first related search it gave me was “tsunami sushi
sf.” So I guess in the big scheme of
things what happens in Japan, stays in Japan.

Which
brings us to the other big news which is of
course the iPhone glitch that caused the clocks on these phones to be turned back an hour instead of forward to
adjust for Daylight Saving Time. This
meant users’ phone clocks were actually two
hours off, and one user nearly missed yoga class.

If
only people paid more attention to my blog!
In March I was all over Daylight Saving Time; embedded in my post is the simple
solution to the problem, adopted by Russia, which is to abolish DST
altogether. (Russia’s abandonment of DST made the news in March,
too, but unless you subscribe to the Moscow Times you won’t be able to read
this article about
it. For a charming video on this
decision, click here).

April

The
big news in April was the speech given by British prime minister David Cameron
in which he suggested that immigrants should learn English. The Guardian story on this topic is an odd
read, because it was published before the actual speech, and is written in the
future tense: “The prime minister will
open his speech by saying,” and “Cameron will say,” and “The prime minister
will stride into sensitive political territory when he accuses …” and so forth.

My
mention just now of the future tense, and my use of “read” as a noun, might
have made some readers squirm. Yes, such
usage does beg the question, “Is it reasonable to require anybody to learn English as a second language, given how tricky a
language English is?” Also begging this
question is my April post, “The Trouble with English.” Actually, my post doesn’t beg the question, it simply poses the
question. Rhetorically. And then answers it. The phrase “begging the question” is exactly
the sort of idiomatic expression that makes this language so difficult, though
of course idioms are only the beginning of the problem. Perhaps if Cameron had read my post, he’d
have been more sensitive. (No, of course
that’s not true.)

May

In
May I posted a rant against
imbeciles who, in the name of journalism, cheat at sport and write about
it. The May issue of “Outside” magazine
had a particularly annoying article by Andrew Tillin, an arrogant shitweasel
who jacked himself up on testosterone so he could rider faster in meaningless
45+ races and think grand thoughts like “Take that, you motherfuckers. There’s more.” Except there isn’t, because despite cheating
he still ended up in only 17th place because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s
doing. Then he actually makes money by
writing a book about it.

Of
course, I couldn’t just berate Tillin and his ilk without providing an
alternative to their so-called journalism, so I did my own experiment where I
donated two units of red blood cells to a blood bank, thus giving myself an
athletic impediment roughly equivalent to the advantage gained by
blood-boosting or using EPO. I studied
my performance decline closely and (unlike the doping journalists) provided a
detailed, objective report with lots of charts and graphs, free, to my
albertnet readers.

What
I couldn’t have guessed when I posted that was how timely my post would
be. Later that month, Tyler Hamilton
went on “60 Minutes” and admitted that he’d doped throughout his career, and
claiming he saw Lance Armstrong use drugs as well. This bombshell spawned all kinds of articles
including this one. The most remarkable development, though, is how
mainstream this news topic has become. Armstrong’s
doping allegations were featured twice this
month in “The Onion,” a mainstream online magazine not known for covering
cycling. Check out this feature and this one.

June

The
big world news in June, of course, was of the deployment of troops in Yemen by
the son of its injured and evacuated president, Ahmed Ali Saleh. I won’t bore you with the details since you
know them already, but I couldn’t help but to notice what a great Father’s Day
gesture this was. I mean, to deploy
troops in the streets of the capital on Dad’s behalf… it’s really amazing.

I
did my best to honor my own father with a Father’s Day post, but fondly
recalling how he’d bawl out the cat or deny the family TV privileges just doesn’t
hold a candle to stepping up and commanding a military. I’d like to do more for my dad but I
can’t. It’s just how I was raised.

July

Of
course July will be remembered for Australian Cadel Evans’ magnificent victory
in the Tour de France, and more specifically, for the astonishing turn of
events that transpired at the final victory ceremony, where Australian pop star
Tina Arena sang the Australian national anthem.
As famously reported in Velo News, Evans
remarked, “I was a bit surprised that Tina Arena came out to sing the anthem,
that was very nice of her. … to stand on the Champs-Élysées with an Australian
singing the national anthem … it’s not a dream that comes true for many
Australians.” Such humility in a true
champion … I mean, Tina Arena? Are
you kidding me?

As
an American, though, I couldn’t help but wince when I read that news. Of course I have no problem with my
countrymen failing to win the Tour; it’s just that the national anthem of the
U.S., which has been sung ten times at the Tour de France, is so fricking
lousy. When, earlier in the month, I
posted an extended harangue against our anthem, I neglected
to compare it to other anthems, such as Australia’s. The Australian anthem is actually quite good;
its clunkiest lyric, “Our home is girt by sea,” is far less embarrassing than
the great number of bombastic and silly lines that disgrace the U.S. anthem
like so much graffiti.

August

Needless
to say, the big news this month was that Scotland finally took steps to combat
its obesity problem. (You’d think, with
all the movies and TV shows the U.S. exports over there, that the Scots would have
gotten the hint a lot earlier. Is our
world leadership waning?) Suffice to
say, the world rejoiced at the announcement that leading
retailers in Scotland had pledged to take measures against obesity, such as displaying
fruits and vegetables more prominently.

In
an amazing coincidence (or did I get an advance tip?), during this same month I
wrote not one but two posts about the
food of Scotland: this one and this one. Oddly, I didn’t gain weight in Scotland,
though I enjoyed all kinds of hearty fare, such as haggis (a mixture of the
minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions,
oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal)
and the famous Full Scottish Breakfast, consisting of a tattie scone (greasy),
hash-brown cartridge (greasy and salty), bacon (‘nuff said), a large sausage
lozenge called Lorne sausage (greasy, salty, generally alarming), and blood
pudding (a chewy, mulchy little disk of congealed, salty pig’s blood). That breakfast aside, I really liked the
Scottish food, and I hope the retailers don’t change it too much.

September

In
September, albertnet focused on cycling:
the US Pro Challenge, an epic ride I did in Colorado, and my food-heavy
account of the Everest Challenge bike race.
I will now confess that I’d hoped one of these stories would win me the
Ig Nobel prize for
literature. Alas, I didn’t even get a
nomination.

Of
course, I was up against some pretty stiff competition, as you’ll know if you
followed the news on this subject. The winner in the chemistry category had invented
a wasabi-based fire alarm; another award was given for research on whether people
make better decisions when they have a strong urge to urinate. In the literature category the winning entry was the “Theory of Structured Procrastination.” I
guess I can’t compete with that. I was
frankly stunned when this article won the prize, though, because I really
didn’t think its author would ever finish writing it.

October

This
month brought me more disappointment:
I posted two fiction pieces to albertnet, and neither of them won the
Man Booker Prize. (I realize the prize
is only for writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, but I’m still
disappointed.) The second of my stories,
“Before the Fall,” was hailed as
a “heart-wrenching but also darkly funny tour de force” by … nobody! So I lost out to the novel The Sense of an Ending, by Julian
Barnes.

Of
course you’ll recall the scandal this prize caused this month, when the head
judge described the novel as “readable.”
Whether this infuriated elite readers because it’s not sufficient
grounds for awarding the prize, or whether it infuriated them because great
literature isn’t supposed to be readable,
is unclear to me. In a Guardian article about the award, the winner brushed off the scandal, remarking, “Most great books are
readable.” I guess some obvious
exceptions would be Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow. (No, I haven’t read either of those. How could I?
They’re unreadable!)

Barnes
himself couldn’t help but praise his own prize-winning book, though in an oddly
humble way: “Those of you who have seen
my book … will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical
book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the eBook, it has
to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.” So now I have four reasons to go buy The Sense of an Ending: 1) it won the Man Booker prize; 2) it is said
to be readable; 3) it is a beautiful object; and 4) as I’ve said before, I want
printed books to survive.

November

My
most popular (or shall I say least un-popular) post for this month was “The British Faucet Conundrum.” So far it’s
had 123 hits; one person #1’D it
(whatever that means); one person flagged it as “Funny”; and it elicited two reader comments, only one of which was from a member of my family. I’m happy to see it getting read, but at the
same time I’m disappointed in the poor response (34 hits, no responses) to
another post from November, “Spotting Bad Restaurants,” which I think is a very
useful guide. I provide a number of
simple ways to recognize a bad place before it’s too late to leave. If nothing else this could save you a number
of rushed trips to the bathroom later.

Perhaps
my restaurant post could have been researched better. (Of course it could have, my research budget
for this blog being ZERO.) I missed a
major criterion of a good restaurant, that being “Is it kid-friendly?” If the big restaurant news for this month had
hit sooner, my post would have been more complete. I’m referring, of course, to the major revelation that a restaurant in London had started
charging moms a “baby tax.” As you know,
they didn’t get away with it, and published an apology on their website
stating “this is an isolated incident” and “we will be in contact with Natasha
Young and Anna Sheridan with a personal apology for their mistreatment by our
staff.” Um ... unless the two moms dined together, wouldn’t that be two isolated incidents?

Semantics aside, I have to believe the “baby tax” problem was related to the
poor performance of individual restaurant staffers, not the policy of the
restaurant’s home office. Staffing
problems are widely acknowledged among restaurants in the UK; one place I went
to even admitted to it, right on the menu:

December

Okay,
I’ll come right out and admit it: I
didn’t follow the news at all in December.
I was laid up at home all month with a broken femur, as I blogged about
here, here, and here. Pretty much the only major world news I read
about was Lewis’s comeback. What, you
didn’t follow the story about Craig Lewis, the American pro cyclist who
broke his femur during the Giro d’Italia back in May? I suppose you were too engrossed in the
doping allegations against Lance Armstrong to be following the athletes who are
actually still racing. Anyway, Lewis crashed
in the Giro and broke his femur, and struggled to get back to racing, and
eventually needed a bone graft because his leg wasn’t healing right. I’ll be keeping a close eye on him next month
to see how he does. You should, too.

Conclusion

Well,
so much for 2011. I hope your 2012, and
mine, are (even) better. I’m so glad you
made it to the end of this post. Dare I
hope this post ascended to the pinnacle of literary achievement, Readability?